Brevisulcenal F has been isolated from a dinoflagellate. Masayuki Satake and co-workers from the University of Tokyo have isolated and characterized this deadly compound, which killed many fish in New Zealand.

Dale Boger and colleagues have reported in Organic Letters on the functionalization of alkenes using iron. When I first saw vinblastine I thought of Dale Boger because he does so much work on this compound and it looks like I was thinking the right person.

Duncan Wardrop and co-worker from the University of Illinois in Chicago have reported in Organic Letters on an interesting approach to form a carbene by presumably forming a tetraazafulvene intermediate, which breaks down to the carbene by losing two molecules of nitrogen (ie: N2). At first I wondered how scary this reaction is because of the gain of entropy, but it looks pretty straight forward: they just add DIC (diisopropylcarbodiimide) to the tetrazole and then load the reaction mixture directly on a column for purification.